I arrived today at the destination for Leg 35, the California State Capitol in Sacramento .

Guess what it looks like. Yep.

Monochrome stereo image of a state capitol building that, surprise surprise, looks a lot like the US Capitol

California State Capitol, also California State Capitol, ca. 1926

Yeah. Exciting.

Sacramento’s a good sized city, 35th largest in the US and growing fast. There’s a good long Wikipedia article, which I sum up as follows: It’s a city. I mean, is there anything really interesting about it? Not that I can see.

Which is why I am very pleased to think of Sacramento as marking the end of the Boring Bit of this EarthWalk. In the 729 days from 12 Nov 2022 (the day after I got to St. Paul, MN) through 10 Nov 2024 I visited a total of twenty sites of which thirteen were good old exciting (yaaawn) state capitals. (The rest were two impact craters, two meteorite discovery sites, two observatories, and one spaceport.). That’s an average of 37 days per leg, a lot of that walking across rather feature-poor plains, mountains, and scrub lands.

By contrast I estimate that in the next 729 days I will visit 37 sites, averaging twenty days per leg, while hitting at least six large cities. Of these sites only two will be state captals; the rest will be legitimate and interesting space- and astronomy-related places. Granted, many of the sites will be clustered quite close together and there will be some long legs otherwise: One should take me around fifty days, and then in November 2026 I probably will be in the midst of the longest, by far, leg of the whole EarthWalk! Still, only one state capital per year! I’m thankful.

In real life, it’s getting colder and greyer in Syracuse. There are occasional rays of sunshine through the clouds, both literally

Crepuscular rays from the sun in a mostly overcast sky

Crepuscular rays

and figuratively: On yesterday’s walk, I found a $20 bill on the ground. Not enough to render this week non awful, but it was something.

October report: Average daily steps down from September, but a little better than the previous two Octobers; Average daily distance also down from September, but only slightly, putting into a virtual tie with October 2022 for second best monthly average distance. Five bike rides, down from six in Octobers 2022 and 2023 but the same as August and September 2024.

A map showing my progress is here , a spreadsheet with progress detail is here , and a Google Earth KMZ file is in  this Google Drive folder . Present coordinates: 38.578°N, 121.568°W .


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